‘Anthem’ Has Removed Its Cosmetic Elysian Caches Because Reasons

This week brought with it a new, very small patch to Anthem to fix a few minor issues while the team works on larger things to come. But also with this patch reaffirmed that the game was indeed taking away Elysian caches from the end of Strongholds, with no immediate plans to see them return. They are gone as of today.

Elysian caches have been the subject of much debate among the Anthem community. You do some sort of objective during the day to get a key, a contract, a few world events, or what have you, then you run a Stronghold and open a chest at the end. For as many people have keys, that’s how many rewards you get, so it can be anywhere from 0-4 per run.

The problem? There are 162 items in Elysian caches, and the majority of the drops are not cosmetic items, but instead currently useless bundles of crafting materials that absolutely nobody wants. And out of the actual cosmetics, there are no armor pieces like many fans were hoping to see, but instead probably 90% of the drops are small decals (some are okay), and then a scarce handful of armor materials and a full wrap or two.

So they were underwhelming, but least it was something, and while BioWare did say up front these were on a clock, given the current state of Anthem when the playerbase is in active revolt, it certainly seems like the wrong call to remove them when I would be amazed if more than 0.0001% of players had gotten all these items.

Anthem

BioWare

I played a lot of Anthem after this update went live, running dozens and dozens of Strongholds, but I think in the end I only got down to about 85 caches remaining, and most of what I did get was garbage. In all those openings, I think I got maybe 2-3 decals I liked and one new armor material. That’s it. Again, the majority of drops were crafting materials. The other problem with this system was is that you’d have no idea how many people in your group had keys, so while you were guaranteed one drop a day, that’s all you were guaranteed, and I played many, many Strongholds where no one opened any chests because everyone was on their twelfth Heart of Rage run for the day.

And yet even if the rewards were lacking, removing any kind of content or things to grind for with Anthem in the current state that it is feels incredibly unwise. I know this was the “plan” from the start, but plans should shift when the situation changes, and Anthem’s situation has most certainly changed in the last month or two.

It would be one thing if Anthem was replacing this old set of caches with new caches, or saying that they were reworking the entire system and just adding all these items as challenge rewards or something, but they’re not doing that. They’re just removing them and issuing this as their official statement from their community manager:

“They've always been planned as a temporary thing since there was a timer under the challenges. There is a chance that they'll come back again at some point.”